FXPHD - HOU206 Houdini FX TD Fundamentals

Many VFX tutorials and courses teach a specific topic.."How to create a waterfall", for instance. While these are helpful, there is also a need for courses that teach fundamental principles. Instead of learning a 'trick', the course member gains a skill to craft their own solutions. This is especially true for TD's even more, likely spending 70% or 80% of their time solving problems instead of mimicking the steps of a "how to" tutorial.Enter this course. It aims to build a fundamental understanding of the core principals of Houdini; the areas every FX TD has to feel comfortable with to solve the problems found in his day to day production work. This is where VOP's and expressions play a very important role. We will gain a fundamental understanding of DOP's and finish of the term with a look at a commercial project I recently finished. The course is aimed at wrists who have done a course in Houdini previously and feel comfortable in the app but would like to get to the next level to kick start their FX TD career.course syllabusClass 1: Attributes: One of the core elements of Houdini. You will get a deep understanding of attributes, variables, mappings and expressions.Class 2: Volumes: What is a volume and how can volumes help an FX TD in his day to day work. We'll discuss the various volume types and create systems that visualize how the various volume types are constructed.Class 3: In the first of a two class miniseries we are going to dig a bit deeper into VOP's. We will discuss the concepts of VOP subnetworks, if node, point cloud lookup and the for each SOP. Building up to class 4 where we will build a point separator.Class 4: We continue where we left of last week and build the actual point separator, are you ready to get your brain fried?Class 5: In this class we are going to look at the use of matrices in VOP's. We'll transform and align a randomly positioned and rotated object on the origin, apply some operation to it and move it back where it came from.Class 6: We'll learn how to build a flow (del) field from a curve in SOP's and advect particles with it in POP's. We use the advectByVolumes POP for that. Next well reconstruct the advectByVolumes POP by using a VOPPOP.Class 7: We'll dive into the world of DOP's and get familiar with microsolvers. In the class we'll take a conventional FLIP setup and add the ability of mixing colors.Class 8: Part 1 in a series where we build a custom spray solver in DOP's. This solver is driven by a cached FLIP simulation.Class 9: Part 2 in a series where we build a spray solver in DOP's. We'll incorporate a FLIP solver and complete the setup.Class 10: In that last class of this term we are having a look at particles in DOP's and point cloud lookups.